A Pilot Assessment of a School‐Based Youth Court in a Resource‐Poor African‐American Urban School District: Lessons Learned From Youth Court Volunteers

This study assesses the benefits of youth court participation for volunteers (N = 14) serving as jurors in an urban school‐based youth court. Focus group and questionnaire data indicate that volunteers are capable of providing more effective sanctioning decisions than adults. Volunteers reported developing citizenship skills including learning about the law and decision‐making skills. The youth court leaders developed self‐confidence and maturity while learning the conflict resolution skills necessary for rendering dispositions and conducting trials. We interpret our findings within the context of the youth court literature, the issue of the school‐to‐prison pipeline, and Elijah Anderson's analysis of the Code of the Street.     

First Amendment Showdown: Intellectual Diversity Mandates and the Academic Marketplace

Once described as a quintessential marketplace of ideas by the Supreme Court of the United States, the academic marketplace has been criticized recently for institutionalizing a left-leaning ideology within its curriculum and academic discourse. As a result, national activists and organizations have been calling on state legislatures and university administrators to adopt policies and report on steps taken to encourage intellectual diversity and protect political and cultural minorities from faculty bias and academic retribution in the classroom and other university settings. But who would win a constitutional showdown between the academy and those seeking to infuse academic discourse with alternative viewpoints? Based on an analysis of the First Amendment concerns at stake in this ongoing controversy, this article concludes that university administrators should have the upper hand in such a constitutional challenge given the specific characteristics and selective nature of the academic marketplace.     

Identifying Collateral Effects of Offender Reentry Programming Through Evaluative Fieldwork

The transfer of offender supervision from prisons to community corrections has prioritized the implementation of reentry programming and outcome evaluation oriented toward impact specification and evidence based practices discovery. Similar to rehabilitation research, generally, reentry scholarship tends toward the statistical documentation of recidivism and related public safety indicators while under-utilizing qualitative techniques. This study reports the qualitative methods and findings from a mixed methods evaluation of a national model county reentry program for offenders with co-occurring disorders. Observation of treatment services, in-depth interviews with jail administrators and services providers, and focus group interviews with a sample of treatment group participants evidenced collateral benefits of programming. Discussion centers on treatment program implications and the value of mixed methods for justice program evaluation.     

Regionalism,environment and Southern African class struggles∗

“In late April, 1992, the Malaysian government hosted an inter‐ministerial meeting for governments of the South in preparation for the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June. This would have been a praiseworthy initiative if not for the government's dismal record on environmental issues, especially on tropical timber logging. However, the government‐controlled media went out of its way to give the opposite impression in the weeks prior to the conference — just as it did before the 1989 Commonwealth Heads of Governments1 Meeting and other international forums.”     

Why the Electoral College is good for political science (and public choice)

While the Electoral College may not be good for the political system, it is very good for political science (and public choice). This essay documents many of the ways in which this assertion is true.